Book Review: Abundance

Klein and Thompson Present Compelling Ends, but Forget the Means

There’s a fundamental question at the heart of any writing project, from the shortest tweet to the most sprawling work of historical biography. Who is this piece for?

If you’ve only ever written in contexts where others are directing you to write, such as in school or at work, this question generally gets answered for you. You’re writing for your teacher, or for your boss, or for the people in accounting.

But when in the world of freeform writing, like non-fiction or this Substack, this question becomes thornier. You don’t know exactly who’s going to read your piece, but you still need to have some understanding of what sort of context your audience has as they approach your work. Otherwise you can encounter issues where your reader gets frustrated because they already know that Louis XV was succeeded by Louis XVI and they just want you to get to the bloody point. Conversely, if you underexplain things to your audience, they may get confused because it’s been 100 pages and you still haven’t explained who this Hitler fellow is and why he’s so important.

This is the conundrum faced in Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance. If you are at all familiar with either of these authors and their prior work at the New York Times and The Atlantic, then the best thing you can do with this book is force as many of your friends and family to read it, because there isn’t much worth your time in the book. That’s not to say that the book is badly written or fails at what it sets out to do. Just that it is primarily a compilation of subjects that the authors have previously written or podcasted on into a single, mostly comprehensive, package.

Credit: Valero Doval

But to avoid underexplaining to those coming to this review having not yet read the book, it might be fruitful to get in the details of what Abundance is about. In short, Abundance is a book that posits that we should want more from society. More housing, more green energy, more science, more of what makes life good. The book opens with a slightly corny depiction of the world in 2050 where Abundance, as they see it, has triumphed. Energy is cheap, clean hypersonic air travel is readily available, factory farming has been supplanted by cultured proteins, vertical hydroponics has replaced industrial agriculture, and unleashed technological innovation has created a world where treatments for all manner of seemingly incurable maladies can be flown to people’s houses via drone.

Klein and Thompson’s world of tomorrow is one that a good many people would kill to live in today. So why hasn’t it happened already? The fault, according to Abundance, lies not with some cartoonish collections of villains hell bent on thwarting progress for kicks and giggles, but with processes put in place during the 20th century, mainly at the behest of well meaning liberals cut from the mold of Ezra and Derek.

Consider the case of housing. If you believe that the problem facing America is that there are fewer homes than there are people in places like California and New York, as the authors convincingly argue, the obvious question to ask is “why?” Abundance makes the case that blue states have, through decades of seemingly sensible policies, made it basically impossible to build at the levels needed to make sure everyone can live in some sort of home. Local zoning regulations make it illegal to build anything that isn’t a detached single family home with a garage and a yard. Environmental regulations take projects that could reduce people’s commutes and allow them to live in modern energy efficient homes, and force them to go through lengthy review processes to ensure that any environmental harm, no matter how small or insignificant, is accounted for and mitigated. Requirements for big projects to use union labor and contract with small construction firms add additional cost onto projects, killing projects that only just made financial sense without these additional costs. Extensive community consultation processes cost time, and therefore money.

Each of these restrictions on building, on their own, make sense. Who doesn’t want nice homes, environmental protection, union jobs, and community input? But as anyone familiar with Simpson’s Paradox can attest, the act of agglomeration can cause unintuitive inversions, turning a collection of small, good things, into one big, bad thing.

In a particularly poetic twist, all of these reforms, carried out by liberals with the best of intentions, have created a world in which all their desired outcomes have been flipped on their head. The environment is worse off because people have to commute 50+ miles to cross the gap between the jurisdictions where they can afford to live and the dynamic cities where they work. Union jobs are more scarce because even if 100% of projects require union labor, 100% of nothing is still nothing. Community hearings and public comment become an unrepresentative farce of democracy because people who want to move to a neighborhood and those who can’t spare the time to spend an evening sitting in a hearing are ignored, while the voices of elderly, wealthy retirees predominate.

A similar picture is painted for infrastructure like green energy and high speed rail, where well meaning efforts to make every constituency is heard results in paralysis of the system, such that states lead by the Republican party, such as Texas and Florida, are building green energy and commuter rail faster than the blue states that purport to care about the environment and transit.

Abundance surfaces a similar, but not identical issue to that of building in the realm of inventing. The academy, and its principle funders in the National Institutes of Health, have become overly bureaucratized and risk averse, requiring more and more documentation for research projects that consequently become less novel and more repetitive in response. Perhaps the most galling statistic in the whole work is the claim that 40% of research scientists’ time is spent applying for grants and documenting their work. Again, there is a respectable motivation behind this. A rigorous grantmaking process is a check against fraud and a way to make sure donor and government money is kept safe from the sorts of bizarre projects that get administrators hauled in front of congressional committees.

But the dark side of this sort of accountability is sclerosis, and a convincing case is made that the way inventions are created and deployed are insufficient to bring us to the utopian vision Klein and Thompson sketch out in their introduction.

But if the book paints a compelling picture of the what and the why of Abundance, it fails to cobble together a how. For all the book’s discussion about the ways various stakeholders within the Democratic coalition have contributed to a world where it’s hard to build and govern, it doesn’t address the point that these stakeholders hold sway in the party and are still in possession of material interests that lead them to abuse the existing system to throw sand in the gears of progress. The building trades unions that use threats of environmental lawsuits to strongarm developers into making concessions at the bargaining table still have that weapon in their arsenal, just as construction hostile neighborhood busybodies still have the ear of the local elected officials that got elected on promises to never touch municipal zoning regulations.

This is where Abundance, in an effort to remain approachable to the lay reader who doesn’t know their CEQA from their NIMBYs, stumbles. The book could use an additional chapter on how to actually achieve abundance given the existing dynamics within the Democratic party that is so heavily critiqued throughout. There is a clear demand for specific policy changes that are implied, but not explicitly stated, such as changes to environmental review laws reduce the ability of individual litigants to stall or kill projects they don’t like on dubious grounds. But if you want to make changes to policy you need to create a coalition that demands change, one which is strong enough to challenge the coalition for the status quo.

Without going so deep into what this hypothetical final chapter would look like as to be effectively writing fan non-fiction, it seems as if there are three potential mechanisms of change that could be used to achieve the policy changes that are prerequisites of the abundant future that Derek and Ezra imagine, some of which the very publication of Abundance may help to facilitate.

The first is what one might call a “bottom-up” theory of change. In this scenario, Abundance is a sort of secular bible, used as scripture by the Apostles of Abundance to aid in the conversion of members of the public who are unaware of the debate or else undecided, akin to the way Uncle Tom’s Cabin advanced the cause of abolitionism by creating a compelling narrative of the horrors and brutality of slavery that was easily digestible for previously disinterested. Armed with this new rhetorical arrow, a movement of everyday voters is galvanized into action, demanding reforms to environmental regulation, procurement rules, and grant-making procedures which overwhelm those interested in maintaining the status quo.

The second mechanism of change is one where Abundance effectuates change in a top down manner. Here, the core assumption is that the median voter is not especially fussed about the minutiae of policy and mostly cares about outcomes like lower rent, cheaper energy, better medicine, and fewer homeless people on the street. Granting this assumption, the role of Abundance within the broader Abundance project is to convince elites, both politicians and leaders within the Democratic coalition such as environmentalist, labor leaders, and miscellaneous non-profit actors, that a change in governing philosophy is necessary. Here, the main goal of Abundance is to get decision makers like Senator Alex Padilla on board with the idea that bureaucratic reforms will achieve liberal aims far better than the current approach of massive appropriations made without consideration to the bureaucratic hurdles that prevent that money from being spent effectively.

The final avenue to achieve abundance is one in which, rather than changing the beliefs at the top or the bottom, it is assumed that the various actors that oppose abundance in one way or another have motivations that are coherent and unchangeable. Just because some there’s some new book written by a couple guys with titles like “opinion columnist” and “staff writer” employed by snooty publications, that doesn’t mean that the Sierra Club doesn’t still see construction as an inherent negative to the environment by default and the San Francisco Building & Construction Trades Council doesn’t still view California’s various environmental regulations as useful cudgels to extract concessions from their negotiating partners during labor disputes. What is instead needed, which this publication has advocated for in the past, is to elevate other interests in the Democratic tent which can form a countervailing coalition for reform to push against the existing coalition for status quo.

In fairness to the authors, it’s hard to propose workable theories of political change that stand up to uncooperative force that is reality, and perhaps making such proposals was outside their comfort zone or beyond the scope of what they wanted for their book. Regardless, Abundance is a worthwhile primer for those still trying to figure out why it seems like nothing can get done these days and is worth picking up even if you think you know everything there is to know about housing regulation, energy infrastructure, research grant-making, and technology deployment. The book is also a breezy 230 pages, so you should be able to lend it out to everyone in your social circle in good time.